I am going to publish a story about each painting that means a lot to me. Self-Portrait in the Red Turban is probably number one in this category.
Self-Portrait in the Red Turban
I always wanted to be an artist. My grandmother gave me a book from which I taught myself to draw when I was five. Then at the age of thirteen I enrolled in a four-year course of study at an Art School which held classes after the regular secondary school day ended. There is a great system of art and music schools that still exists in Russia. After the end of my regular school I would run to my second – art – school every day to study art history, painting, drawing, sculpture and composition. I was unaware that in the rest of the world Abstract Expressionism was the mainstream. In my world the mainstream was Rembrandt, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, all the “Old Masters”.
I can say that I had a classical training in art. The “Old Masters” were considered to be “gods of the past”, however, the present day “masters” had to create in the style of “social realism” to be approved by the ruling Communist Party. That was not too exciting. In addition, one day someone said to me that “there had never been any great women artists”.
At first, I tried to argue but I had no facts to prove the opposite. During that time in Russia no one knew about Artemisia Gentileschi, Georgia O’Keefe, or Lee Miller. In the meanwhile Linda Nochlin’s 1971 article, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”was published in the United States. It is ironic that the same words that empowered women artists in the United States made me give up my dream of becoming an artist in the USSR. As I observed that all “great artists” of both present and the past were men, especially those who chose to join the Communist Party, I also heard negative remarks about “women’s art” which was often considered unimportant and limited to flowers and such. That was very discouraging for me as a young person and the desire to become a professional artist was suppressed by the time to apply to college.
Drawing always remained my way to express my emotions and feelings. I drew to express myself and it made my life more bearable. But I gave up on the idea of becoming a “professional” artist because I did not want to be a mediocre artist. Mediocrity as an artist seemed to be predetermined just by the fact that I was a female. I became a “shadow artist”.
I learned the term “shadow artist” much later, while living in the US and reading Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way. “Shadow Artist”, according to Cameron, is a person whose “inner artist” or “artist within” was suppressed for a number of reasons. Such people do not believe they can be “real artists”. They love art, try to be around artists, sometimes they become models, muses, or supporters of artists. Sometimes they marry artists. Cameron did not go so far in her book as to state that being a “shadow artist” is much more typical for women than for men, but that seems to be the case.
When I moved to the US in 2001 my life changed. I was greatly encouraged and supported by my loving husband and started becoming a “professional artist”, getting my degree in art, coming out of a “shadow”. The more I learned about female artists the more interested I became in “women issues” in art. One of my favorite artists, Katherine Ace, once said that as a woman she should be careful about what she chooses to paint. She said: “painting flowers is politically dangerous for a female artist, playing right into cultural stereotypes. It sets you up to be dismissed“. But she painted flowers anyway, as well as other subjects.
Self-representation, like painting flowers, risks being stereotyped as “feminine.” Many of my works are based on some form of self-representation. Even if use models, I still often identify myself with the models, their life stories and feelings. I believe, that engaging with self-representation places me within the mainstream of contemporary female artists who took themselves as subjects.
In her study of female surrealist artists W. Chadwick characterized them with: “the affinity for the structures of fabulist narrative, and a tendency towards the phantasmic and oneiric.” Other qualities shared by female surrealist artists, according to Chadwick, include embrace of doubling, masking, and masquerade as defenses against fears of non-identity. Chadwick pointed out the following representational strategies that continue to resonate in the works of female surrealists:
- Self as Other;
- Self as Body;
- Self as Masquerade or Absence.
Many women adopted practices of “self-othering” – identifying with moments prior to historical time and/or outside the civilized cultural spaces identified with patriarchy. Chadwick sees these categories as broad frames “within which it is possible to enact dialogs between contemporary women artists and Surrealism.” You can see fabulist narrative, phantasmic and oneiric qualities in some of my work. One example is identifying myself with Van Eyck in Self-Portrait in the Red Turban.
I represent myself in this painting as “Other” and as a male. This is my way of reflecting on my role as a woman artist in contemporary art world which still treats women artists differently than male.
The crows included in this work are connected with my childhood memories and experience with my mother’s pet crow. It combines my feelings of bitterness of rejection. Once at the age 4 while being rejected by a crow (see the full story in this post), and then again, at the age 14 being rejected by the Art World when I was told “there had never been great women artists.” The images of the crows in this work symbolize great artists whom I admired and wanted to belong to their world but was not allowed. This work is a statement that I do belong to the Art World. I state this by wearing Van Eyck’s famous red turban and the coat with crow’s feathers. This connects me to the Art World as well as to the Crows’ World.
This painting is very important to me, so when it was sold after my MFA thesis show, I felt that I had to make another one. That is why there are two version of it:
2011 
and 2013:
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Scratched out the trees that were light on a dark background with the intention to “finish later”. I have a pile of such “finish later” paintings at home… 
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